Understand Service Maps

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Understand Service Maps

    Service maps in ServiceNow provide a visual representation of active alerts on Configuration Items (CIs) and their interdependencies within application and monitored services. This visualization helps you quickly identify the source of alerts and understand how different CIs affect each other, enabling more effective remediation.

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    Service maps dynamically update as CI relationships or alerts change, giving you real-time visibility into service health. Starting with the Quebec release, service maps also highlight entry point problems when alerts are bound to those points, though alerts themselves do not display directly on entry points.

    Accessing Service Maps

    • From the Application Services list for application services
    • From the Monitored Services list for monitored services

    Key Features

    • Visual CI Representation: Different icons distinguish applications (e.g., Microsoft IIS, SQL servers), physical and virtual machines, network starting points, data storage devices, and related web services.
    • Alert Severity Indication: CIs display colors representing alert severity—Critical (red), Major (orange), Minor (yellow), Warning (blue), OK with alert (green), or no active alert (no color).
    • Relationship Indicators: Gray connectors show relationships between CIs, while other icons indicate redundancy and workload distribution.
    • Session Persistence: The service map session remains active indefinitely, even without human interaction; users should log out or close the browser tab if session persistence is a concern.

    Practical Benefits

    By using service maps, you can:

    • Gain immediate insight into the health status of your application and monitored services through alert visualization.
    • Understand how issues in one CI impact others, supporting more informed troubleshooting and faster resolution.
    • Identify critical points in your service topology, including entry points that may affect overall service availability.

    Service maps show active alerts for CIs and the relationships between CIs. By viewing this information, you can better understand the source of alerts and take remediation steps. The service map is available for all application services.

    About Service Maps

    A service map shows alerts with impacted CIs and CI interdependencies. For example, changes to a connection between a host and hypervisor appear on the service map. As service map definitions change, the service map, alert, and impact information updates accordingly. From the Quebec release, there is enhanced visibility. When the alert is bound to the entry point, the service map identifies an entry point problem.
    Note:
    Alerts will not be displayed for the entry points on the service map.

    You can open a service map from these places:

    • From the Application services list, you can view service maps for application services.
    • From the Monitored services list, you can view service maps for monitored services.

    The following icons are used in service maps. The icon shapes are slightly different for application services.

    Table 1. Service map icons
    Icon Description
    (Application server icon.) Represents applications such as Microsoft IIS or SQL servers.
    (Call server icon.) Represents physical and VM computers and servers.
    (Entry point icon.) Represents the network starting point. For example, Layer 3 devices appear toward the top of the map, and connected software and services appear near the end of the map.
    (Redundancy box icon.) Shows the number of redundant CIs.
    (Load balancer icon.) Shows the workload between machines.

    (Gray connector icon.)

    		 The gray connector shows a relationship between CIs.
    (CI with no active alerts box icon.) Each CI with no active alerts box represents a network CI. A gray box represents a CI with no active alerts. Information about the CI is hidden.
    (Redundancy box icon.) Hides multiple CIs that are designated as redundant.

    (Box with orange severity color icon.)

    		 An impacted CI displays the color that represents the severity of the alert associated with the CI.
    • Critical (red): Immediate action is required. The resource is either not functional or critical problems are imminent.
    • Major (orange): Major functionality is severely impaired or performance has degraded.
    • Minor (yellow): Partial, non-critical loss of functionality or performance degradation occurred.
    • Warning (blue): Attention is required, even though the resource is still functional.
    • OK (green): An alert is created. The resource is still functional.
    • No color: No active alerts.
    (Storage icon.) Represents a fiber channel, hard drives, or other data storage devices.
    (Web server icon.) Represents related web services for the network such as NGINX or JBoss web server.
    Note:
    Session timeout settings don't apply to this screen. The session remains connected, even when there is no human interaction. If this setting is a concern, either log out or close the active tab in the browser.